About this project

Design thinking

Last week, my dad, who is an educator in a college in China, told me that he got his first dose. What's more surprising is that he told me that elderly over 60 and people with underlying health conditions are not prioritized for COVID-19 vaccinations, which is almost the opposite situation than here in the U.S. I found it would be interesting to use U.S. and China as examples to show why vaccine policies are so different area by area.

At this point, "when can I get vaccinated?" has become a daily check-in for a lot of people. When I saw someone sharing their experiences cutting the line to get vaccinated, I feel happy for them but also angry that what they did violates the rule and might have disadvantaged others in greater risks or danger.

The rationale behind the rollout policy isn’t something ordinary people have to know or understand, while we are together suffering from this specific period of time, it is necessary to think about the big picture and understand how policies are made. As a learning designer, I would like to explain why vaccination policies are so different in different places, and why government constructs and implements such rules, so people get to know the rationale and would behave as they ought to without disadvantaging others who are actually in line.

Design rationales

Mayer’s Cognitive Thoeries of Multimedia Learning

There is no image or text in this audio project, which can be argued on the counter side of Mayer’s CTML’s Redundency principle that people can learner better without redundent information being presented at the same time. There is no live scripts or subtles for this podcast, which can offload students’ cognitive effort by minimizing extraneous load.

Voice principle and Personalization principle suggests that people learn better with coversational human voiceover then machine voiceover, which are adopted in this project as well.

Baddeley's model of working memory

The phonological loop processes sounds and is responsible for speech based information, as a part of Baddeley’s Model of Working Memory. This includes sounds that are processed in one’s brain. When the listeners are listening to the podcast, the information enters WM storage, which has a very limited capacity. This podcast is designed in simple languages and explanations, which is not supposed to take off too much capacity of one's working memory that they do not remember anything after the podcast is finished.

The phonological loop also evolves to facilitate the acquisition of language. As the target audience can be ESL learners, this simple podcast can help those to learn and get familiar with English too for its proven connection in improving language perception and production.

Podcasting and Education

This project is designed to be a news-style podcast, which can be served as an effective learning tool according to itsinherited pedagogic advantages (Cebeci & Tekdal, p 49-50):

• Podcasting serves anytime and anywhere mobile learning

• Podcasting provides the opportunity of learning through listening

• Podcasting makes possible content that is attractive to students

• Podcasting eases accession and selection to a wide range of audio resources in the Web. This provides better cognitive-based personalization in learning.

Prototype

Limitations and future work

Due to the time constrain, I did not have time to interview anyone who can be seen as an expert and have that person talked about the rationale of prioritizing different groups of people under specific circumstances for each country. Even though I did intensive research on the “why”, what I know might still be biased. If possible, I would like to ask experts to talk about the whys from a professional perspective, and the podcast will be in a more conversational style than it is right now.